(A series brought to you by Feminist Global Resistance)

The Series:

Patriarchy ensures that male (almost exclusively white colonizer) history is remembered though a few women shine through or are given a twisted footnote.

More often, women are relegated to lost tomes and forgotten lore. Some shine through in song and tales while others, more recently, are beginning to have their stories told (progress?)

Throughout history, women around the world have stood to fight patriarchy, some winning, some losing, but they often brought revolution and change, their lives given for the just causes of freedom, liberty and justice.

This series will focus on the stories of some of those women who have stood up to patriarchy fighting oppression and colonization; confronting violence and abuse; And sacrificing everything in a fight for freedom, justice, and human rights.  There have been many.  I have chosen just a few of those who inspire me by their bravery and resolve.

Learn their names, learn from them, let them inspire you to do great things.

 

Part 3: Lowell Mill Girls

 

“The Mill Girls”

 

During the U.S. Textile Boom, dating from the 1780’s through the 1800’s, young women and girls comprised over 75% of the workforce.  Their ages ranged from as young as 10 years to middle age but, the majority of these women were in their 20’s.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution (1760-1850) and the invention of the “Flying Shuttle” (mechanical loom), “Spinning Jenny” (mechanized spinning wheel), power looms, the Cotton Gin, and water powered then steam powered textile factories, the textile industry in the US was transformed.  Women, usually tasked with spinning and weaving on family farms and selling their goods at local markets and on the streets, found it difficult to compete with the new factory-made goods.

Across New England, as textile factories proliferated, the textile corporations recruited women from farms and villages to work in the factories with a promise of steady, monthly paid wages as well as room and board in a comfortable boardinghouses

 

 

Women came to work at the mills for a variety of reasons. Many came for financial stability and a steady wage, to assist their families, to pay off personal debt, to gain experience or education (purchase books or access resources), to improve their social standing and meet more people, or to relieve their parents of the burden of supporting an unwed daughter.

What they, found was their “opportunities” were under the complete control of the corporations for which they worked. Their entire schedule was set by those corporations – when they slept, when they ate, when they worked. They found themselves living under strict curfews and a very strict moral cod, working under high production quotas and very long hours. Their lives dictated by the men who owned the corporations and the men who ran the corporate mills.  Everything dictated by the ring of the factory bell.

After years of low wages, long hours and dangerous conditions, the Mill Girls rose up against the oppression of their corporate overlords.

Learn their story, be inspired…

 

HER story…

A half century before well-known mass workers’ movements in the US, the Lowell Mill Girls were organizing

 

The Mills that dotted Massachusetts and the rest of New England promised wages, boarding, and a good life for women. Everything a young woman (or child since most employed children as young as 10 years of age) might need or want.

The Lowell Mills based their business & production model on what was named “The Lowell System”, a labor production model invented by Francis Cabot Lowell.  The model was designed so that every step of the manufacturing process was completed under one roof and the work was performed by “young adult women”.

Children and young women flocked to the Lowell Mills for jobs and a chance for a “good life”.  Lowell was different than the rest, offering education, room and board, cash wages, and did not employ any girl under the age of 15….

What they found was long hard hours of labor and a corporation ruled by men who dictated the women’s activity and behavior every minute of every day. Work days, six days a week, of 12 to 14 hours made it impossible for an employee to receive an adequate education since all courses and lectures were held after long days on their feet, many falling asleep during lectures or forgoing them completely for a much-needed rest.

The Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills were widely admired but, in reality, like all the mills, they soon became a living hell for the women who worked there.

Due to the overproduction of goods during the 1830’s, the price of finished cloth dropped. In response to the falling prices, the mills cut wages and increased work quotas thereby forcing the workers to work harder at a faster pace.

New management took over and the mills soon began to change. In an excerpt from,  The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, (1985, David E. Shi, author), the period was described:

“By the mid-1840s a new generation of mill managers was in charge, and their outlook differed considerably from the founding group. Profits rather than people seemed their primary, even sole, concern. As one of the new managers admitted, ‘I regard my work people just as I regard my machinery.’ Absent from his perspective was any sense of paternal responsibility for the moral and intellectual elevation of his operatives. ‘So long as they can do my work for what I choose to pay them I keep them, getting out of them all I can.’ This was not the enlightened industrial republicanism that Jefferson had envisioned and described; rather it was the cynical materialism that Charles Dickens saw at work in England at the time. Visitors to Lowell in the 1830s and 1840s repeatedly noticed the mills’ growing similarity to the feared English system and also the discrepancy between the original Lowell ideal and its second-generation reality.”

By 1834, the salaries at the Lowell Mills were cut by 25%, the work quotas increased and hours demanded for work increased with them. The working conditions degraded – the air was very hot in the machine filled rooms (the temperature and humidity levels kept high to keep the thread from breaking); the air quality was poor filled with toxic fumes and dust (cotton dust which can lead to byssinosis, a lung disease); the windows were often closed. Each room held up to 80 women and two overseers.

 

STRIKE!

 

The “Lowell Mill Girls” had had enough.  The joined together, forming The Lowell Factory Girls Association, and called a strike in protest. They marched to several other mills, rallying more mill girls, held public meetings and rallies, and signed a petition stating, “We will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued.”

While the “Lowell Mill Girls” activists grew in strength and resolve, the owners and managers of the mills were horrified by such a display.  Having the greater power and resources, the managers and owners cracked down and smashed the strike.

That didn’t deter the women activists. In 1836, another strike was called. This time, their numbers had grown, they were more organized, developing their own “Constitution” and produced literature for organizing.  Again, the strike was smashed by the powerful and wealthy corporate owners and managers but this time, the women had a greater impact.

Even after these defeats, the mill girls refused to give up. In the 1840s, they shifted their tactics and began a new strategy… “political action” (Keep in mind, women couldn’t even vote in the U.S but that that didn’t stop the mill girls):

They organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.

They organized huge petition drives (2,000 signers on their 1845 petition and over double that number on their petition the following year) asking the Massachusetts state legislature to cap the work day in the mills at 10 hours.

They organized association chapters in other mill towns throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

They published “Factory Tracts”, a publication to expose the wretched conditions in the mills.

They testified before a state legislative committee.

They campaigned against a state representative who was one of their strongest opponents and handily defeated him.

With all their hard work, they achieved very little in the short-term but, in the long term, the Lowell Mill Girls made history.  They created the first women’s labor union in the US and, as such, paved the way for women’s and worker’s movements to follow.

Those strong and brave women, the “Lowell Mill Girls”, helped transform the nation and showed other women they didn’t have to put up with injustice. They taught us how to join together, support each other and fight for our rights.